A police race watchdog has claimed that British law enforcement has not gone far enough to dismantle so-called “institutional racism” and accused Nigel Farage’s Reform UK party of sowing division by stating that two-tier policing in favour of ethnic minorities is coming at the expense of native white Britons.
Abimbola Johnson, a human rights barrister who served as the chairwoman of the Independent Scrutiny and Oversight Board for the police’s National Race Action Plan, has come out in defence of anti-racist initiatives enacted by police forces amid heavy criticism of the policies following the death of 18-year-old student Henry Nowak.
During the now-infamous police bodycam footage documenting the end of Nowak’s life, published last week by the Hampshire Constabulary, officers were seen handcuffing the dying teen as he attempted to convince them that he had been stabbed and could not breathe.
It was later revealed in court that officers had unquestioningly believed false accusations from Nowak’s killer, Vikrum Digwa that Nowak had been racially abusive. Even after discovering evidence of Digwa’s habitual lying, police still reportedly sought to cast Nowak as the aggressor days after the killing.
The revelations have led many to claim that there is a “two-tier” system of justice, in which woke diversity and inclusion policies have created a culture that incentivises police and other officials to give deference to ethnic minorities, while disbelieving white Britons, as has been documented at length during numerous inquiries into the Muslim child rape grooming gang scandal.
However some, including Abimbola Johnson, argue that the anti-racism agenda still has more work to do in Britain, saying that the board she chaired “repeatedly found that progress under the police race action plan had been too slow, too inconsistent and too poorly embedded to meaningfully tackle the racism it was created to combat.”
Writing for The Telegraph, the police watchdog said: “The metrics continue to show racial disparity across key areas of police contact: stop and search, use of force, strip searches, custody, misconduct, workforce experience and public trust.”
Johnson argued that it was wrong to assert that “improving policing for black people comes at the expense of white people,” and that people from all backgrounds experienced poor policing.
“Parties like Reform try to pit groups against one another, particularly by suggesting that concern for non-white communities somehow means indifference to white working-class communities. That is wrong.”
In rebuttal, Reform UK Shadow Home Secretary Zia Yusuf said that police race guidance, which explicitly demands that officers treat people differently depending on their race, demonstrated that there was an institutional bias against white Britons.
“The notion that there is structural anti-white prejudice embedded within British policing is not just speculation or something Nigel Farage says, or something I say, it is literally on the police’s own website, both Hampshire Police and British policing,” Yusuf said.
Critiques of the leftist infiltration of policing have not only come from Reform in the wake of the Nowak trial. Indeed, even former Labour Party Home Secretary Jack Straw said last week that he felt there had been an “over-correction” in the efforts to stamp out “institutional racism” following the killing of Stephen Lawrence in 1993.
Meanwhile, the former chairman of the Metropolitan Police Federation, Rick Prior, said on Sunday that Scotland Yard has been infected with the “woke mind virus” and no longer treats people equally under the law.
Prior, who was unlawfully sacked from his role in 2024 after publicly addressing concerns of officers facing false accusations of racism by then-chief executive Mukuund Krishna, who is currently under investigation for alleged corruption, said that for more than a decade, the Met has sought “equity of outcome between ethnic groups rather than equality of opportunity and equal treatment under the law.”